Decide What You Want More of To Grow Your Business
In business and life, the saying goes, “you’re either growing, or you’re dying.” Kudos to you if your organization is an industry leader today; it certainly wasn’t easy to arrive at that distinction. Remaining an industry leader will be harder if you aren’t continuously growing and improving. If you’re standing still and resting on your laurels, your competition will quickly surpass you.
You can grow your organization through a variety of marketing and sales methods and many tactics; see my other articles on effectual cold calling, public speaking, networking, trade shows, social media and strategic marketing.
Regardless of the growth method, you will grow fastest if you precisely identify what you want. Below are seven key areas you may want to grow. Determine your type of growth and then set a strategy to make that happen.
1. Gross Revenues
Technically any growth will increase gross revenues whether you choose to add a new service offering, a new geographic market, or grow a particular customer type. However, what you are asking yourself here is: for the market space you currently occupy, is there more market share that you want to capture? Perhaps you are a startup or relatively new to the industry; your initial focus may be to concentrate on growing by selling more of your current offerings.
2. Profits
When I owned an architectural firm, my partners and I decided we enjoyed being a 20-person niche leader in environmentally responsible public safety, recreational, and municipal buildings. We didn’t want to grow much in revenues or firm size; however, we wanted our profits to grow. When we benchmarked our project profit compared to similar size competitors, our profits were in the lowest quartile yet, we wanted to continue providing outstanding customer experiences. We instituted a strategy to increase fees while providing high value, clearly define our scope of services, and establish a project management process to reduce production time and errors. Over ten years, this strategy significantly improved our profits.
3. Leaders
Depending on where your organization is in its life cycle, you may need to start thinking about growing new or more leaders. Will some key leaders begin to retire within the next five to ten years? Would you like to develop a service offering but lack a dynamic person to lead that offering? Building influential leaders takes time. Therefore, you need to continually be thinking about building bench strength under your current leadership team.
4. Team Size
Renowned business leader and author of Good to Great, Jim Collins, tells us the way to build a great organization is to get the right people on the bus. Once you have the right people, you can figure out the proper role for them. Your bus may change direction, and good employees with strong soft skills are adaptable in how they can help you grow. Particularly in today’s economy, when firms are expanding, good firms are competing for the best talent.
5. Geography
You may want to consider growing your organization by providing services in a new geographic region. Are you known for a particular service that would be welcome in an underserved area or growing region of the state or country? Many large design and construction firms decided to grow by providing their services to developing countries.
6. Services and Products
A smart way to grow your business is to inquire what services or products your best clients need that complements your current service or product portfolio. Your best clients are your most loyal clients. Thoroughly understanding thier changing pain points and how you can alleviate these issues, is an area ripe for growing a new service.
7. Clients
You may want to grow the number or types of clients you have for a variety of reasons. Do you have “high customer concentration?” That is, do you receive too much income from too few clients? Alternatively, you may have a balanced client portfolio but want to grow more clients who resemble your favorite client. Develop a list of the characteristics your best clients possess (e.g., sales size, project type, ease to work with, etc.) so that you have a clear picture when looking to grow “A-clients.”
As you can see, just saying, “I want to grow my organization” isn’t specific enough. You need to identify what you want to grow in detail before laying out the strategy, resources, and method to obtain that type of growth. No organization has endless time or dollars. By focusing on what you want to grow, you can budget your expenditure and increase your return on investment.
I hope you will reach out to me if you are looking to grow your organization and build your business development and marketing skills.
